How Al Met Pizza
by oranges-and-leather-boots
Summary: There are very few Muggle things that the wizarding world does not have a better answer for, but Albus learns that pizza may be one of them. A sweeping tale of high romance-sort of-between a boy and one of the things that boys love best: their food.
1. Chapter 1

reviews! they are my life force. it may not seem like much, but every single one causes me to do a dance of joy that i would honestly prefer no one ever, ever saw. if the idea of that amuses you, please review, and i will definitely respond to you-once i put ice on my knee that i probably banged into the door frame with my dancing. needless to say, the Rs go hand in hand-so do read before you review, or we shall all be very confused.

-um, this contains two swear words, which are only swear words in some places. i advice caution because of the chance of suffering dangerous exposure to my brain, but nothing else. (if you object to the suggestion that a boy suggested that he might feel an interest, which could possibly be interpreted as non-platonic, in another boy...i have nothing to say to you but to suggest that you put your fingers in your ears and hum when it gets to that sentence, alright? (if anyone writes to tell me they actually did that, i will adore them forever))

ta.

There are very few Muggle things that the wizarding world cannot claim that they have a better answer for, and had had when the rest of humanity were still wandering about in furs and marrying each other's siblings, but kindergarten is one of them.

There are simply too few wizards in England for such a thing to be created, for one. Perhaps a few families with young children in each moderate sized city is just not enough for a proper localized school system. Hogwarts itself draws students from the whole of England to reach a reasonable student population, but there is simply no such thing as a boarding preschool. It's silly, and, though the idea has received the support of several prominent members of the Malfoy family, who would have done just about anything to have spent their childhoods away from their parents' loving care, no one has given it real attention. Until they are old enough to be sent away, wizard children must receive whatever education they can from their parents, or be sent covertly into an unsuspecting Muggle facility, rather like humanoid cuckoo eggs with sticky faces.

In the Potter household, Mr. Potter gathered up his two young sons and one small daughter every day after lunch, and endeavored to instill in them the heartfelt love of learning that he sensed the children should probably learn from someone or other.

He quickly gave up. The simple fact was that the children were far too intelligent to be properly instilled with anything, and they wanted to be outside playing catch far more than he wanted to be inside trying to remember the present imperfect, and what on earth was wrong with it. So the next day the Potter children were left to wander, with the slightly desperate reminder that there were copies of the second grade speller sitting around, should they ever want to take a look at them. Lily spewed milk across the table at that, and James rolled his eyes, given that he had had his father's dusty copy of Shakespeare's sonnets 1-87 sitting up in his room for the last year.

Albus Potter smiled toothily through his cornflakes, and once the dishes were cleared and his older siblings were in the back yard trying to wrestle each other into the dirt, set off toward the Muggle primary school. There he sat politely on the stone wall that ringed the yard, and waited for the afternoon recess to begin.

After half an hour or so the children he could see inside the small windows came streaming out to play. One small girl and a smaller boy came tearing across the yard, pushing to outstrip the other in the race to freedom. Behind them the other dispersed, and they pulled to a stop, twenty meters of so from where Al sat on the wall. They looked about, saw him, and the boy hollered, "Whatcha doing there?"

"Got nothing else to do," Al said cheerfully.

They looked him over. "Wanna play catch?" the girl called.

Al considered. "Okay," he said, and hopped off the wall. He and the other children played until a scrawny stick of a woman appeared to chivy them back inside, at which point he waved goodbye to them all, and returned to the wall to wait for the end of the school day.

When the children returned, they greeted him and he skipped off with the crowd, walking them home, and offering jokes and help with their homework as they walked. By the time the last of them wandered reluctantly to a doorway held open by a welcoming mother, Al had thirty or forty fast new friends, and some acquaintances who were fun to play with, but at seven or eight were far to old to really be considered friends. He returned to the wall the next morning, and every morning after that, until he was ten years old.

Which was how Al met pizza.

Or, more accurately, how Al first met a very nice young man who was also called Al, but whose real name was Alan, something of which Albus was terribly jealous. He'd been sitting on the wall outside the school building one gray November afternoon, waiting for the end of classes, when he was hailed by a blond boy on some sort of cranberry-colored conveyance which made rapid progress down the street, though it was smaller than most of the Muggle vehicles Al was used to. The boy lazily pulled to a stop, checked the brake, and meandered over to where Al was perched, a stack of odd boxes balanced on his hip.

Al nodded at him. The bigger boy sat down a little ways away and, after taking a long swig of coffee from his mug with the little sliding top, started chatting. They talked for quite awhile without any particular subject, and it didn't even occur to Al to ask for his new friend's name until it came up casually, halfway through a story about the chips shop at the end of Edgar Row. He exclaimed at it and the boy laughed, pushing his boxes to the side so he could turn more towards Al. They had a funny design on the top, in red and green, a depiction of a sort of round thing speckled with other things and what he supposed might have been mushrooms.

The boy, who Al guessed to be about fifteen or sixteen, and lanky for it, followed his gaze and explained that he was a delivery boy, and that he took the boxes, which Al gathered contained some form of food, all around the city, and for a measly handful of quid. Which was barely enough to cover the expenses he ran on his moped, apparently the name of the device, or as he mostly called it, or rather 'her', "that bloody machine." He said it rather affectionately though, and did not seem to mind having to explain obviously basic things to Al in the slightest.

"So, what're you doing here, anyways?" he asked after a bit.

"People-watching," Al said. "Or waiting to people-watch. No one's out yet."

"You don't go to school, then?"

"No."

"Ah." He didn't seem to think anything odd of it. "And your parents?"

"At work. They dunno I'm here," Al explained, then conscientiously added, "I don't think so," because there was always the possibility. One never knew, with Dad. Alan nodded in understanding.

"Watching for anything in particular?"

"Nah," Al said. "Just boring at home, some days." He paused. "Most days, sometimes."

Alan nodded again. "M' folks run a bookshop down in Turrey," he said thoughtfully, sipping some more coffee. "Bloody boring, most days. Old men in jumpers and leather patents, you know. Professors."

Al made a sympathy noise. Every now and then Hogwarts professors of one strain or another would be among his parents' many guests, and they were always very dull.

"Aw, my mam and dad're alright, just less'n fascinating. Wish I had siblings most of the time."

Al responded with something to the effect of 'yeah right,' and Alan looked questioningly at him. "What, you got a brother or something?"

"Just the one," Al said, pulling a family picture from his pocket, taken with a fortunately Muggle camera, "and my sis. But they're more'n enough. That's my dad," he said proudly, as Alan leaned over to look. "And Mum. Lily's got her hair all funny in this one."

The larger Al grinned appreciatively at the gathered Potter family, and rubbed a hand through his spiky hair, which Al was certain was not originally so blond. He asked questions about all of them and Al answered happily, though he decided not to mention that James, who Alan was for some reason quite appreciative of, was only fourteen. Somehow it made all the times James had locked him in the broom closet seem a lot more pathetic than if he let Alan think his big brother was rather older than that.

They talked for a long time more, until Al could see the sky turning faintly to dusk, and they both heard each other's stomachs rumbling. Larger Al grinned and opened one of his boxes, revealing a large rounded flat thing, covered in red and white blotches, which smelled very strongly of grease and vinegary tomatoes. Alan tugged on it until it separated into triangular pieces.

"Don't you have to bring those to somebody?" Al asked hesitantly, wondering whether he'd misunderstood, as the other boy offered him a large piece. Alan shook his head.

"This one's mine," he explained, separating an even more enormous triangle from the gooey cheese. "Dinner, or close enough to pass for it anyways. My mate Andy may be pissed, said I'd bring some back for him, but then he may be pissed already, out drinking again with Rod and that crowd." He shrugged and sank his teeth in. "Dunno why I bother with 'im really, so might as well not. And you look peaky."

Al didn't bother to deny this, as he was as small and scrawny for his age as everyone on his father's side, though Mum claimed he'd shoot up in a few years. He experimented with ways to curve the flexible dough for a minute, trying to keep cheese and driplets of oil from sliding off the top. Eventually he got it sort of balanced on his splayed fingers, up off his palm, and slid a bit of it into his mouth.

Al did not have much of a relationship with his mouth. It was mostly two dimensional, as far as he was concerned. He put food into it when his parents ordered him down to dinner, and the food went somewhere and hopefully didn't come back out again. It was just sort of there, on his face, whenever he needed it, and didn't give him much trouble when he didn't. But now, Al was discovering that his mouth had volume. It had dimensions. It had a whole range different senses that he had never contemplated before, of spaces, and most of them were now focusing one hundred percent on _heat_ and _spices _and _tomato sauce._ There was a whole department for that, it transpired. Even _mushrooms_ wasn't half as bad as he would've expected. Luckily Alan was an understanding type, and he merely grinned and took another piece while Al experienced his religious moment.

They continued talking, Al spluttering a bit around his food, and Big Al taking careful bites so that he could chatter without obstruction. Alan ate in dainty little bits, and motioned to Al that he was free to engulf another as he worked his way through his own first. Al did, making a note to copy Alan this time, who obviously had practiced eating efficiently while he talked.

"I'll see you here sometime," Alan called when he finally admitted he did have a tad bit of work left to do. "Call me any time, you've got my mobile."

Al was thrilled by the whole exchange. He was a naturally vociferous child, but he had a tendency to run out of things to actually talk about before he ran out of things to say, and he often simply fell silent in the fear that other people might think he was beginning to prattle. Alan, however, had no tolerance for awkward silences, and simply refused to recognize that they might exist. Al could tell that Alan wouldn't think any the less of him if he prattled on, and he resolved to be exactly like him when he was older. And this he went on to do.


	2. Chapter 2

**Yeah. so, you know how I declared Pizza finished? (well. no you probably don't.)**

**This is the second part of How Al Met Pizza as i originally planned it. How_ever_, certain changes are being made. I now plan to turn the first part into a much longer series, chronicling events in the lives of the whole Potter family**. **Frankly, I think i'll make better progress that way. But I thought that, since I have this, I would make it available to you, my esteemed readers. Al/Scorpius.**

**I dunno if more of this will be appearing once I start up with my new plan, which will show all the Potters as they grow up, and will probably have different pairings. If you care in any way, or want to hear more about Al and Scorpius as they are here, then review and tell me. Or review and tell me about your cat, i don't care. If no one cares...i dunno. A miracle will occur.  
**

**...  
**

"Would you, for the bleeding life of Christ, shut _up_, for a minute?"

Al sighed, and resolved to finish the tale of his mother's latest dinner party gone wrong with Martha later, as Chris did not seem to be in the appropriate appreciative mood. Chris was never in the right mood. Very high-strung, he was. He nodded.

Chris took a minute to compose himself, and then stiffly directed Al out of the office and towards his next stop. The orders were only slightly more curt and unhelpful than usual, although this probably testified less to his supervisor's patience than to the fact that it was simply his base state of being.

Or maybe not, the story wasn't really that interesting when he had to scrub it of magic, so perhaps Martha wouldn't enjoy it. He'd think of something that she'd find funny while he cycled out to Maybridge.

Al quite liked bicycling at night. Not that night here beneath the moderate-sized city glow that was home was anything like the darkness of a proper night, spent out under the branches of the Forbidden Forest, themselves so high they seemed to form a second shell of the heavens, helping the groundskeeper with some particularly unpopular task for detention. Al got such assignments fairly frequently, because he got detentions rather a lot. And although Filch hated giving him them ever since he began to suspect that Al might actually be _enjoying_ hours after dark in the Forest, there weren't many teachers that would take him, and Filch himself had stopped overseeing detentions personally ever since he turned ninety-seven and had to be fitted with a special-made wheelchair, which could climb stairs and achieve quite dangerous speeds in pursuit of students. It did look rather odd, though, and Filch had realized some students found it rather funny. That simply would no do.

So he spent most of the time in his office, or wheeling about less-used corridors practicing his invisibility spells at a feverish mutter. The students who passed by still laughed some, but he ignored them and kept at it, flickering in and out of existence. Al never laughed. Some of those spells were looking pretty good, and the last thing he wanted was to have that chair coming at him without warning. So Filch seemed content to leave Al's detentions as they were, given that Al was one of the few who had never directly perpetrated wrong against him, and Al got his hours in the midnight forest.

Midnight never looked like that at home, black as the heart of a teakettle. Here it was gold and twilight glowing, all the lights in the town rising up and bouncing off the sky. Above, high up, there was blackness, but between him and it the lights created a defensive wall, so he rode through a yellow ribbon of car lights and storefronts with a river of dark sky flowing above, bordered by the buildings on each edge of the street.

It was just as well he liked it, all things considered, because while the traffic wasn't murder it was at least a good mugging, the drivers going by sending slush and freezing mud at him with a certain mean-spirited enthusiasm as he cycled by.

Al simply sped up, making a quiet game of dodging them and whistling as he went. The call for the first of this lot had come from an apartment out at the edge of the Maybridge center, the slightly smaller town that conjoined with his own home of Carrey. He found it without trouble, a outside doorway on the second floor with stairs leading up to it, which he climbed

A muffled voice said, "Thanks."

Al inspected the creature on the sofa. A boy, his own age, he realized, though he could not make out his face from the door. He could tell two other things, too.

First, the boy was a wizard. And he was also skinny as hell. His wand lay abandoned on the floor among a host of fallen tissues, which rose skyward in a pile like some great oncoming army. Obviously the boy had given up on using magic to clean up not long before even tissues became too hard to lift.

Al clicked his tongue, exasperated. Someone should be watching this boy, he decided, which certainly wasn't happening, if he was getting his sustenance from pizza delivery. He set the box firmly on the table by the door and crossed to the couch. The boy uncurled in surprise at the approaching footsteps, and looked blearily back as Al knelt down to look at him.

He was, frankly, quite remarkably pretty, even when not at all in the state for it. His eyes were huge and blue gray beneath the bloodshot, and his features were very delicately shaped.

It took him a moment to locate Al's face, and then his eyes met his with an expression of vague, intelligent curiosity.

He was far too thin for Al's mind, skinny by nature and by natural inclination to not eating. Bare feet poking from plaid pajama bottoms nestled together on the squashy sofa arm, long toes clenched at the cold, but he obviously hadn't thought or felt able to pulling the blanket back down when it rode up. His hands were tucked up to his chin in a very infantine pose, forced on by temperature and which Al could tell, from the tense way he held it, the boy had been distinctly unwilling to adopt, and was now just plain incapable of moving out of. The teacup balanced on the sofa back was empty.

Al was aware that he had been engaged in a far more detailed survey than was regular in the pizza delivery boy, but in the back of his mind he had already begun phrasing the calls to all the things he would have to blow off tonight, because he wasn't going to be leaving this flat for a while.

This boy needed a keeper. And with no one else capable, Al saw no reason why he shouldn't take on the job. It was a bit too late to try and get rid of the flu with magic, even if Al possessed any more talent for that particular brand of magic than the boy seemed to, but there were certainly some things that could be done.

He frowned, flicking through a final mental list of necessary changes. "Where's your bedroom?" he asked the boy.

The blond stared up at him, eyes wide. He gestured, not seeming to wonder why Al was asking. Al headed off to the bedroom, which he found tiny and disgustingly neat, although as it was essentially empty there was little mess that could really have been made. He yanked the blankets from the bed—which hadn't been slept in since the last time it had been carefully straightened after the owner exited—and strode back to the big blue sofa in the barer main room. The occupant of the sofa squeaked belatedly as Al descended from beyond his limited range of vision, relaxing unwillingly into the unexpected weight of blankets. Al wrapped the top one neatly around his neck, effectively cocooning his new charge, and set off to the semi-separated kitchen area.

Being a wizard made taking over someone else's house far easier—Al had always felt at home in the kitchen, any kitchen, and he privately ignored the fact that that was probably because with Summoning charms it never mattered where things were. He conjured water into the pot, lit the stovetop with a wand spark when it turned out burner lighter was defunct, and summoned tea, cup and spoon from the cupboards. Then he poured the water—it had taken him a while to select the proper kind of tea for the circumstance. No wonder the boy was sick, he privately thought, without sufficient herbal nourishment—located milk in a cooling cupboard, purified the milk (just in case), poured it, and headed out to the sofa.

The boy had managed to work one arm free from Al's enshroudment while he had been in the kitchen, and Al deposited the china in his palm before retreating once more. Some part of him decided that the more time he spent in the kitchen clattering about, the longer it might take for the boy to fully appreciate that a random stranger had worked his way into his life, or as much of a life as lying on the sofa for days was, and kicked him out.

Uncertain of the materials at his disposal, he simply summoned all the food in the apartment towards the well-scrubbed little counter, dismally sure from what he had seen so far that there wouldn't be enough to overwhelm the space.

The stale rice crackers, three carrots, half a head of lettuce and an onion that appeared were unlikely to overwhelm him. He sighed. The boy appeared to be a worryingly healthy eater when he was actually capable of it. Al wouldn't eat much, either, if this was what was on option. Well.

Wishing resignedly for his grandmother's paranoia about empty shelves and the whole roast turkeys she usually kept on hand to feed her prodigious clan, he set to work on a pot of soup that he decided to heat beside the stove, which had stalled altogether and he couldn't be bothered to fix—was it his fault he'd slept through Muggle Studies? No, it damn well wasn't. If they wanted people to stay awake, they should make it more interesting, Dad himself still refused to install a Muggle stove in the house—and set it on the little purple flame he'd conjured.

He found some barley and a few raw potatoes that had been overlooked by his earlier spell, perhaps because they were in a latched cupboard and perhaps because they weren't really real food, and dumped their assorted slaughtered bits into the pot. He flicked his wand to set the fire on the metaphorical 'High.'

"What are you doing?" He glanced up momentarily to see that the boy had attempted a near Herculean feat and followed him into the kitchen, still twined in numerous sheets.

He went back to work. "I'm making you a decent meal."

The boy frowned. "There's pizza," he pointed out, and then, unable to ignore the fogginess with which he himself had spoken, capitulated with "I think."

Al knocked the last of the vegetables from the cutting board into the soup, then flicked it into the sink, where it began scrubbing itself in the company of the other dishes. They seemed to catch the boy's wandering attention. "You shouldn't wash the knives and china together, Mother says," he stated, wobbling slightly and finding the support of the wall only partly by attempt.

"It's coeducational now." Al poked a ladle into the soup. It was sort of thicker than soup, really. The onions formed a squishy layer at the top. "Done."

The boy looked askance at it. "I imagined the pizza, then."

"No."

"No?"

Al took the tasting spoon out of his mouth. "I brought it. Pepper…" He found some.

The boy took this in stride. "So…so, why?" He yawned loudly, his hand moving to cover his mouth, but obviously loath to leave the folds of the quilt. He tugged it closer, looking like a very large laundry-colored penguin.

Al summoned a bowl and ladled it half full. "Despite its many, many merits, and I speak as a pizza salesman, no one has ever yet gotten rid of a fever on a diet of pizza. And this is good, actually."

The boy looked at him, eyes bloodshot.

Al raised an eyebrow. "Are you questioning my cooking?"

The boy looked at the ceiling, squeezed his eyes shut, and sneezed.

Al sighed, and pointed back into the living room. The boy went.

A moment later Al followed, bearing the bowl and a spoon he'd finally discovered in the drawer under the sink—a singular spoon, for some reason, perhaps the boy had no other cutlery—to find him ensconced once more on the sofa. He looked the tableaux over, and saw the look on the boy's face, which clearly stated nothing and no one, not even a particularly determined pizza boy, was going to making him sit up again. He sighed, and seated himself on the sofa arm, passing the bowl down. The boy took it, pale fingertips extending just up from the neck of his protective blanket armor.

He ate an onion. Al looked him over. "Does anyone every feed you?" he asked at last.

The boy glanced up, face expressionless. "Me."

"Uh huh. Parents?"

He shrugged, or so Al was fairly sure. "Grandfather kicked me out," he says simply. "Mother didn't really mind." He paused, thinking. "Or maybe she didn't notice. She's in Spain. Hmm." He ate a carrot. "This isn't bad."

"Thank you. Do you have a father, too, or is he in Spain?"

"Of course not. He hates Spain." The boy reached for tissue. "He just laughed. Thought it was funny."

"Funny?" Al raised an eyebrow.

"Dad thinks odd things are funny. He knows I'd love to be kicked out if it would annoy Grandfather. That's weird."

"What?"

"You can move your eyebrow on its own like that?"

"Yeah." Al did it again with each. "You can't?"

"No…" the boy tried for a minute, and sneezed. Al handed him a tissue and set the box in his lap.

"Well then. Eat your soup."

The boy looked at the spoon, then the bowl, and then slowly took another sip. "This is good."

"You've said." No need to sound so surprised.

"Oh. Its just, it looks…" he faded off, wisely. "Hmm." He seemed to be contemplating simply falling forward into the bowl, asleep. Al patted his shoulder.

"So! Where can I sleep, then?"

The blond blinked up at him very slowly, as though each one required individual concentration. "What?"

"Sleep," Al repeated. "Got another couch?"

Another blink. "Ah," the boy said. "Oh…"

Once he had the boy tucked safely into a nest of clean blankets, made a fresh pot of tea to leave on the sofa arm, and magically incinerated the mulch layer of tissues, Al's pager rang. He quickly flicked it off, but the boy on the couch merely turned slightly at the sound, burying his sleeping face in the pillow. He checked the messages—one irate notice of imminent firing, ending with the despairing question of how on earth anyone could get lost for three hours in a district the size of Maybridge. Al sighed, and stuck the thing into his back pocket as a problem to deal with later.

For now, he needed a place to sleep. The boy had ordered—the only word for it, despite the sleepy edge—him to use the bed, but he didn't like the idea. He was ordinarily quite comfortable staying with other people, but the fact couldn't be avoided that this boy wasn't one of his mates. Frankly, Al doubted he had ever been anyone's mate, or had any himself.

Which was, of course, why he felt that the boy needed Al, but still. It just seemed odd. With a mumble the blond turned over in his sleep, coughing quietly, and Al settled himself on the armchair beside the sofa. This boy needed looking after, after all, so he might as well make sure he was out here to do it.

The problem with this plan, he realized after four AM was slithering away around the corner, was that it didn't actually allow him to get any sleep. It was perfectly comfortable—Al could and did sleep just about anywhere. But the other boy kept doing things. Sniffling and rolling over, curling in and out of a ball. Coughing into the back of one hand with a pathetic little noise like a sneezing kitten. And it was driving Al steadily insane, because there wasn't much he could do about it. Had the other been awake there were plenty of things Al could do to distract or make him feel better, but as it was there would be no way he could do anything without waking the boy up, which he certainly wouldn't be grateful for.

As a little bit of blue and grey crept into the sky the boy's discomfort seemed to ease a bit, and slowly he fell still. Leaving Al, shifting uncomfortably where he leaned over the chair arm to watch, with a growing appreciation for just how pretty the boy was.

He shifted and sucked in his breath, holding it as he leaned in closer. The boy was lovely, even with a nasty cold, and his skin was porcelain fine and smooth. Al had never seen anyone so pale, he thought; not unhealthily, exactly, but as though the boy had been born absolutely transparent, and was only slowly being adapted by the conventions of light on Earth. After a moment of searching Al found tiny, near invisible freckles dusting his eyelids, the color of the thinnest sugar syrup. He was fairly sure they were about the same age, by the faintest of creases and shadows about the boy's eyes, but nevertheless he looked very young. And until tonight, Al had never particularly thought that was a turn-on.

The rest of his body rather thought it was, though.

Al leaned back and sighed, setting his elbow on the chair arm and his chin on it only partially to keep his hand from moving anywhere it wasn't supposed to.

**...**

**Do I need to explain what the pretty little button is for? Do not fear the button. It is your friend.**


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